Competitive Analysis: Why Cisco, Not Juniper?

Networks matter more now than ever, and your choice of networking partner does, too. Why should you choose Cisco?

Cisco understands the strategic value of the network and consistently delivers innovation that drives competitive advantage to your business. Many vendors try to position “Good Enough” network offerings that offer only basic functionality, and end up costing more to implement and manage. Juniper has been a vendor that has consistently tried to position itself as a peer to Cisco in driving innovation. But is this true?

Cisco views the network as an architecture, not a series of parts. This architectural approach reduces complexity, lowers total cost of ownership (TCO), and helps your entire IT infrastructure to work better together to deliver additional business value.

Because we view your networking needs from an architectural perspective, you can be sure that all of our products work together to handle the surge in bandwidth demand, manage devices and power system-wide, reliably deliver video and securely connect to the cloud and mobile clients. With Cisco, you can reduce integration expenses and maximize the utility of your investment!

Cisco takes an evolutionary approach to its portfolio by layering new innovations onto existing platforms. Unlike some of Juniper’s products, Cisco networking components and systems are designed to last a decade or longer. You won’t have to go through a “rip and replace” product turnover cycle that increases your capital expenditures and operational expenses.

You don’t have to choose between innovation and an open network.

As our track record shows, when Cisco creates networking innovation, our objective is to share this widely across the industry through standardization. Other vendors seek to lock you in with proprietary interfaces. One example of this approach is Juniper’s new QFabric system, of which two components have Juniper proprietary interconnects. Cisco’s market leading system is based on industry standards

Video is built into our network.

We develop video endpoints such as Cisco TelePresence and Cisco Videoscape and use our endpoint and IP expertise to build a better network. How does Juniper build the video experience into their network?

You can trust Cisco to deliver.

In terms of meeting our commitments, Cisco focuses on customer satisfaction and building the trust necessary for a long term partnership. We do not make claims that are too challenging to fulfill and result in delayed delivery dates. The following are just some examples demonstrating Cisco’s commitment to deliver versus Juniper:

•Juniper promised 100 Gigabit Ethernet on MX-series edge routing products almost two years ago. It’s still not available.

•Cisco promises and delivers: Cisco announced 100 Gigabit Ethernet on the ASR 9000 edge routing platform in June 2011 and will be shipping in Q4 of CY2011.

•Juniper announced the T4000 core router in 2nd half CY2010. Where is it?

•Cisco promises and delivers: Cisco announced the Cisco CRS-3 core router on March 9, 2010, delivered it in Q4 2010 and within one year, 80 service providers worldwide had deployed CRS-3 as their network foundation.

•Juniper’s Project Falcon mobile platform: After three launches in 2009, 2010 and – again – in 2011, Juniper still has not publicly debuted the product or announced any customers of it.

•Juniper’s Project Stratus/QFabric for the data center: After 2.5 years and several announcements, Juniper still has not delivered on their promise that QFabric is designed to scale “…to tens of thousands of 10GbE ports”.

•Cisco promises and delivers: Cisco announced Nexus in January 2008, delivered it on Q2 2008 and now Cisco’s Nexus data center switch family has been adopted by more than 70% of the Fortune 100. There are more than 10,000 customers for Cisco’s NXOS operating system overall.

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